Since I’m not working actively on RICcreator in the moment, not much have happened the last few months, however I just rewrote some terrible code which was not safe. RICcreator would crash if the settings.xml file is formed differently than expected, so when a new version changed the format, it would crash if the old .xml file was kept.

XML handling

The XML parser previously used was rapidXML which promises great performance, and since I want to do some game related programming with XML I wanted to learn the API. However as I tried to use it with RICcreator I quickly realized it was rather tedious to work with. So I slacked on the implementation. Most importantly, I didn’t do any validation and simply chained the node lookups. So for example to get to the “settings” node in the “RICcreator” node I did this:

doc.first_node( "RICCreator" )->first_node( "settings" )

However if first_node() can’t find the node it returns NULL and in case of this the second call will try to dereference a NULL pointer and crash the application. To avoid this it should have been done like this:

This is quite some code for a simple lookup, so as said I slacked. Adding nodes to a new document (when saving the settings) was even more tedious as you had to allocate nodes and then add them. (On the other hand, I couldn’t slack here.)

So I have been looking for a simpler C++ XML parser and recently I heard about pugixml. I like the API much better, it is also a lightweight parser and apparently even faster than rapidXML so I tried it out. The previous lookup would look like this in pugixml:

doc.child( "RICCreator" ).child( "settings" )

This doesn’t share the problem rapidXML has, because child() returns a “NULL” object on failure. The NULL objects functions all return another NULL object, so you can chaining like this is completely safe as long as you check the final result.

So I have rewritten all XML handling to use pugixml now and I’m quite happy with the result. The code is a lot prettier and most importantly, it shouldn’t be able to crash like before.

Other changes

The dithering have been changed to use Filter Lite instead of Floyd-Steinberg, which produces nearly as good result but which is quite simpler (and therefore faster).

A fun addition is grayscale importing support. If you want to toy around with grayscale images on your NXT, RICcreator makes this easy by letting you import the same image several times with different thresholds in one step.

The Number opcode is now no longer aligned to multiples of 8, as this limitation has been removed in the enhanced firmware.

A few bugs have been fixed and it should be possible to compile in Visual Studio again. (I haven’t checked after rewriting the XML stuff though.)